“Let me repeat: We have been lying to you. The government is not allowing us to spread any knowledge about the walking plague, saying that we would trigger a mass panic. Well, the masses are panicking, and I don’t think keeping secrets is doing anybody any favors. Not at this stage.
“Once someone has converted into the… hell, once somebody’s a zombie, there’s no coming back. They are no longer the people you have known all your life. Head shots seem to work best. Severe damage to the body will eventually cause them to bleed out, but it can take time, and it will create a massive hot zone that can’t be sterilized with anything but fire or bleach. We have… God, we have…” He stopped for a moment, dropping his forehead into the palm of his hand. Finally, dully, he said, “We have lied to you. We have withheld information. What follows is everything we know about this disease, and the simple fact of it is, we know there isn’t any cure. We know we can’t stop it.
“Early signs of amplification include dilated pupils, blurred vision, dry mouth, difficulty breathing, loss of coordination, unexplained mood swings, personality changes, apparent lapses in memory, aphasia…”
If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected…
July 31, 2014: Berkeley, California
Marigold felt bad.
There had been a raccoon in the yard. She liked when raccoons came to the yard, they puffed up big so big, but they ran ran ran when you chased them, and the noises they made were like birds or squirrels but bigger and more exhilarating. She had chased the raccoon, but the raccoon didn’t run. Instead, it held its ground, and when she came close enough, it bit her on the shoulder, hard, teeth tearing skin and flesh and leaving only pain pain pain behind. Then she ran, she ran from the raccoon, and she had rolled in the dirt until the bleeding stopped, mud clotting the wound, pain pain pain muted a little behind the haze of her confusion. Then had come shame. Shame, because she would be called bad dog for chasing raccoons; bad dog for getting bitten when there were so many people in the house and yard and everything was strange.
So Marigold did what any good dog in fear of being termed a bad dog would do; she had gone to the hole in the back of the fence, the hole she and her brother worked and worried so long at, and slunk into the yard next door, where the boy lived. The boy laughed and pulled her ears sometimes, but it never hurt. The boy loved her. She knew the boy loved her, even as she knew that the man and the woman fed her and that she was a good dog, really, all the way to the heart of her. She was a good dog.
She was a good dog, but she felt so bad. So very bad. The badness had started with the bite, but it had spread since then, and now she could barely swallow, and the light was hurting her eyes so much, so very much. She lay huddled under the bushes, wishing she could find her feet, wishing she knew why she felt bad. So very bad.
Marigold felt hungry.
The hunger was a new thing, a strong thing, stronger even than the bad feeling that was spreading through her. She considered the hunger, as much as she could. She had never been the smartest of dogs, and her mind was getting fuzzy, thought and impulse giving way to alien instinct. She was a good dog. She just felt bad. She was a good dog. She was… she was… she was hungry. Marigold was hungry. Then she was only hunger, and no more Marigold. No more Marigold at all.
Something rustled through the bushes. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, and that was now just hungry, rose slowly, legs unsteady but willing to support the body if there might be something coming that could end the hunger. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, looked without recognition at the figure that parted the greenery and peered down at it with wide-eyed curiosity. The dog, which had always been ready with a welcoming bark, made a sound that was close to a moan.
“Oggie?”
We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.
August 1, 2014
Kellis-Amberlee unified the world in a way that nothing had ever unified it before, or ever would again. Cities burned. Nations died. Tokyo, Manhattan, Mumbai, London, all of them fell before an enemy that could not be stopped, because it came from within; because it was already inside. Some escaped. Some lived. All carried the infection deep inside their bodies, tucked away where it could never be excised. They carried it with them, and it lived, too.
The Rising was finally, fully underway. Mothers mourned their children. Orphans wailed alone in the night. Death ruled over all, horrible and undying. And nothing, it seemed, would ever make it end.
But on the Internet, Dr. Matras’s message repeated, over and over again, and others began repeating it with him. The future was arriving. All they had to do was live to see it. So the world asked itself a question:
When will you Rise?
And the world gave itself an answer:
Now.
Welcome to the aftermath.
“In telling the stories of the Rising, we must remember this above all else: We did what everyone claimed mankind could never do. We survived. Now it is up to us to prove that we deserved this second chance.”
—Mahir Gowda
Everglades
Introduction
The most personalized, professional rejection I ever received came from John Joseph Adams. I still have it. I treasure it. I especially treasure the part where it starts “Dear Mr. McGuire…” because sometimes I have a strange sense of humor.
When he sent me that rejection, John was the assistant editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a publication I’ve loved fiercely since I was a child. He went on to become a prolific anthologist, editing some of my favorite anthologies of the last ten years. As a consequence, when I was offered the chance to submit to The Living Dead 2, his second anthology of original zombie fiction, I was absolutely overjoyed.
And then I was stumped. Because I needed a short story that said something new and interesting about the zombie apocalypse, and I wasn’t finding it. Everyone had unleashed the virus; everyone had devoured the world. Everyone had survived.
That was the key. Everyone had survived. But what about the people who didn’t? What about the people who looked at the face of the changing world—the world that was never going to be the same, even if they made it out the other side—and decided to say, “You know what, thanks but no thanks; I’d rather be a statistic”? Any disaster is going to come with a certain soft cost: a certain number of suicides and accidents surrounding the deaths that come as an immediate consequence of the event. I wanted to focus on one of those people.
“Everglades” is, at the time of this writing, the only piece of Newsflesh fiction not to have originally been published by Orbit in some form. I am so glad to have it in this collection, joining its siblings, finally coming home.
Everglades
The smell hanging over the broken corpse of the campus is rich, ripe, and green—the heavy reptile smell of swamplands and of secrets. It teases its way past sealed windows and in through cracks, permeating everything it touches. Across the empty expanse of the quad, the green flag suspended from the top window of the Physics Building flutters in the wind. It marks the location of survivors, waiting for a rescue that may never come. I wonder if they smell the swamp as clearly there, tucked inside their classrooms full of quiet air, where the search for the secrets of the universe has been replaced by the search for simple survival.
Something darts across the pathway leading toward Shattuck Avenue. I twitch the telescope in that direction quickly enough to see a large black cat disappearing under the Kissing Bridge. I haven’t seen anything larger than a stray dog in the two hours of my watch. That doesn’t mean it’s safe to stop looking. Alligators are invisible until they strike, a perfect match for their surroundings. In this dead world, the zombies are even harder to see. From A to Z in the predator’s alphabet.
This is California, a world away from Florida, but that makes no difference now; the Everglades are here. I lean back against the windowsill, scanning the campus, and breathe in the timeless, tireless smell of the swamp.
I was eight and Wes was twelve the last time we went to visit our grandparents in Florida. True to family form, Grandma and Wes promptly vanished to spend their time on the sunny beaches, exchanging hours for sandy shoes and broken seashells, while I dove straight for Grandpa’s tobacco-scented arms. Grandpa was my secret conspirator, the man who didn’t think a passion for snakes and reptiles was unusual for a tow-headed little girl from Ohio. Our visits were wonderful things, filled with trips to zoos, alligator farms, and the cluttered, somehow sinister homes of private collectors, who kept their tanks of snakes and lizards in climate-controlled rooms where the sunlight never touched them. My parents saw my affections as some sort of phase, something that would pass. Grandpa saw them for what they were: a calling.
Grandpa died five years ago, less than a month after seeing me graduate from high school. Grandma didn’t last much longer. That’s good. I haven’t seen any reports out of Florida in days, and I haven’t seen any reports from anywhere that say people who’ve been dead that long have started getting back up again. Only the fresh dead walk. My grandparents get to rest in peace.
That summer, though, the summer when I was eight and Wes was twelve, that was the perfect summer, the one everything else gets to be measured against, forever. Our second day there, Grandpa woke me up at four-thirty in the morning, shaking me awake with a secret agent’s sly grin and whispering, “Get dressed, now, Debbie. I’ve got something to show you.” He rolled me out of bed, waited in the hall for me to dress, and half-carried me out of their cluttered retiree condo to drop me into the front seat of his ancient pickup truck. The air smelled like flowers I couldn’t name, and even hours before sunrise, the humidity was enough to twist my hair into fat ringlets. In the distance, a dog barked twice and was still. With that bark, I came fully awake, realizing at last that this wasn’t a dream; that we were going on an adventure.
We drove an hour to a narrow, unpaved road, where the rocks and gravel made the truck bounce uncontrollably. Grandpa cursed at the suspension while I giggled, clinging to the open window as I tried to work out just what sort of an adventure this was. He parked next to a crumbling little dock, pilings stained green with decades of moss. A man in jeans and an orange parka stood on the dock, his face a seamed mass of wrinkles. He never spoke. I remember that, even though most of that night seems like a dream to me now. He just held out his hand, palm upward, and when Grandpa slapped a wad of bills down into it, he pointed us toward the boat anchored at the end of the dock, bobbing ceaselessly up and down amongst the waterweeds and scum.
There were lifejackets in the bottom of the boat. Grandpa pulled mine over my head before he put his own on, picked up the oars, and pushed away from the dock. I didn’t say anything. With Grandpa it was best to bide your time and let him start the lesson when he was ready. It might take a while, but he always got there in the end. Trees loomed up around us as he rowed, their branches velvet-draped with hanging moss. Most seemed to stretch straight out of the water, independent of the tiny clots of solid ground around them. And Grandpa began to speak.
I couldn’t have written exactly what he said to me even then, without fifteen years between the hearing and the recollection. It was never the exact words that mattered. He introduced me to the Everglades like he was bringing me to meet a treasured family friend. Maybe that’s what he was doing. We moved deeper and deeper into that verdant-scented darkness, mosquitoes buzzing around us, his voice narrating all the while. Finally, he brought us to a slow halt in the middle of the largest patch of open water I’d seen since we left the dock. “Here, Debbie,” he said, voice low. “What do you see?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
He bent forward, picking up a rock from the bottom of the boat. “Watch,” he said, and threw the rock. It hit the water with a splash that echoed through the towering trees. All around us, logs began opening their eyes, pieces of earth began to shift toward the water. In a matter of seconds, six swamp gators—the huge kind that I’d only ever seen before in zoos—had appeared and disappeared again, sliding under the surface of the swamp like they’d never existed at all.
“Always remember that Nature can be cruel, little girl,” said Grandpa. “Sometimes it’s what looks most harmless that hurts you the most. You want to go back?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. We spent the next three hours in our little boat, watching the gators as they slowly returned, and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. I have never been that content with the world before or since.
I’m so glad my grandparents died when they did.
The slice of campus I can see through the window is perfectly still, deserted and at peace. The few bodies in view have been still for the entire time that I’ve been watching. I don’t trust their stillness; alligators, all. Corpses aside, I’ve never seen the quad so clean. The wind has had time to whisk away the debris and even the birds are gone. They don’t seem to get sick the way that mammals do, but without the student body dropping easy-to-scavenge meals, there’s nothing for them here. I miss the birds. I miss the rest of the student body more—although we could find them if we tried. It wouldn’t be that hard. All we need to do is go outside, and wait for them to follow the scent of blood.
A loudspeaker crackles to life on the far side of the quad. “This is Professor Mason,” it announces. “We have lost contact with the library. Repeat, we have lost contact with the library. Do not attempt to gather supplies from that area until we have reestablished communications. We have established contact with Durant Hall—” The list continues seemingly without end, giving status updates for all the groups we’re in contact with, either on or off the campus. I try to make myself listen and, when that doesn’t work, begin trying to make myself feel anything beyond a vague irritation over possibly losing the library. They have the best vending machines.
The broadcast ends, and the speaker crackles again, marking time, before a nervous voice says, “This is Susan Wright from the Drama Department. I’ll be working the campus radio for the next hour. Please call in if you have anything to report. And, um, go Bears.” This feeble attempt at normalcy concluded, her voice clicks out, replaced by a Death Cab for Cutie song. The sound confuses the dead. It isn’t enough to save you if they’ve already caught your scent, but if the radio went offline we wouldn’t be able to move around at all. I doubt we’d last long after that. A prey species that can’t run is destined to become extinct.
Footsteps behind me. I turn. Andrei—big, brave Andrei, who broke the chain on the Life Science Hall door when we needed a place to run—stands in the doorway, face pale, the shaking in his hands almost imperceptible. “I think Eva’s worse,” he says, and I follow him away from the window, out of the well-lit classroom, and back into the darkness of the halls.
A school the size of ours never really shuts down, although there are times when it edges toward dormant. The summer semester is always sparsely-attended when compared to fall or spring, cutting the population down to less than half. I’d been enjoying the quiet. The professor I was working for was nice enough and he didn’t ask me to do much, leaving my time free for hikes in the local hills and live observation of the native rattlesnakes. They have a hot, dry reptile smell, nothing like the swampy green smell that rises from an alligator’s skin. Such polite snakes, warning you before they strike. Rattlesnakes are a lot like people, although that’s probably not a comparison that most people would appreciate.
Monday, some aspiring comedian did a mock news report on the school radio station. “This just in: Romero was right! The dead walk! Signs of life even spotted in the Math Department!”
Tuesday, half my mailing lists were going off-topic to talk about strange events, disappearances, attacks. Some people suggested that it was zombies. Everybody laughe
d.
Wednesday, the laughter stopped.
Thursday, the zombies came.
Some people fought, some people ran, and some people hid. On Saturday, there were twenty-six of us here in the Life Sciences Building, half of us grad students who’d been checking on our projects when chaos broke out on the campus. By Monday, that number had been more than cut in half. We were down to nine, and if Eva was worse, we might be looking at eight before much longer. That’s bad. That’s very bad. Because out of all of us, Eva is the one who has a clue.
Andrei leads me down the hall, through the atrium where the reconstructed Tyrannosaurus Rex stands skeletal judgment over us all, and into the lecture hall that we’ve converted, temporarily, into a sickroom. Eva is inside, reclining on the couch we brought down from the indefensible teacher’s lounge. She has her laptop open on her knees, typing with a ferocious intensity that frightens me. How long does it take to transcribe a lifetime? Is it longer than she has?
In the lecture hall, the smell of the Everglades hangs over everything, hot and ancient and green. The smell of sickness, burning its way through human flesh, eating as it goes. Eva hears our footsteps and lifts her head, eyes chips of burning ice against the sickroom pallor of her complexion. Acne stands out at her temples and on her chin, reminders that she’s barely out of her teens, the youngest of us left here in the hall. Her hair is the color of dried corn husks, and that’s what she looks like—a girl somehow woven out of corn husks that have been drenched with that hot swampy smell. She barely looks like Eva at all.